The success and growth of any brand are dependent on the effective generation of leads. While developing their sales strategies, marketing departments often find it challenging to decide whether they should choose an outbound or an inbound strategy to produce leads. However, to ensure that your marketing efforts are reaching the largest audience, a mix of both inbound and outbound marketing strategies are required. In this article, we shall explore how outbound leads can help improve the growth of inbound leads to maximize the impact of outreach strategies.
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What are outbound sales?
The difference between inbound and outbound sales is primarily concerned with how leads originate. Outbound sales are marketing efforts made to attract prospective customers. These include advertising, telemarketing, outreach through email, etc. When you are actively pursuing a prospect by sending out messages, it is usually considered outbound marketing.
What is inbound lead generation?
In comparison to outbound marketing, inbound sales involve producing engaging content for prospects. Usually, at this stage, a prospect has expressed interest in an organization’s product or service. Marketing professionals have more knowledge of a customer’s preference and use this information to offer creative resources like blogs, newsletters, webinars, etc.
How can outbound sales help to accelerate the growth of inbound leads?
There are various ways in which outbound marketing techniques can facilitate the growth of inbound sales. Let us explore some of these ways:
Outbound marketing can help to build the profile of the ideal customer
Outbound techniques allow organizations to communicate directly with prospective customers. This can be used as an opportunity to gather more information about the types of organizations and individuals that are most interested in your services. Collecting such information can help with creating a profile of the ideal customer for the organization.
An ideal customer profile (ICP) of a business will include information like the number of employees, revenue, location, industry, number of years in business, and customers. The ICP can be tailored to include any other useful information. Having such data from outbound marketing can help to build an inbound sales strategy.
Outbound marketing helps to focus on content marketing
It is said that one of the main reasons why inbound marketing fails to grow the customer retention rate is because marketing professionals often do not often craft a sales strategy for it. The virtual world is saturated with all kinds of content, with brands being increasingly competitive in an attempt to draw visitors’ attention. In order to stand out amongst competitors, it is necessary to craft a unique brand advertising strategy.
Content marketing methods have proved to be a successful inbound strategy that attracts customers through free content posted online. Unlike outbound methods, content marketing does not yield results immediately and requires a carefully constructed approach. Outbound methods can help your inbound leads to grow by making you aware of the preferences of your customers. For instance, you can find out what common search phrases your clients are using and utilize that to produce high-quality, engaging content.
Outbound sales increase website traffic
As you might know, outbound sales directly lead to a rise in traffic to your website. When you send a link to a prospective customer, they can click on it, which then generates conversions for your website. In addition, outbound strategies could also increase organic traffic.
Data indicates that customers typically interact with brands several times prior to making a purchase. If your organization is involved in outbound sales efforts, it is likely that a prospective customer is going to remember having interacted with your outbound representatives. When they wish to make a purchase, they will simply Google your website and shop for your product because they will remember the interaction they had with you. This is true irrespective of whether they purchase from you within a week, or a month, or a year of the interaction taking place.
Outbound techniques can grow online presence and reach
Another method that you can utilize to stand apart from your competitors is by leveraging influencers to increase your reach. Influencer marketing has proven successful since referrals motivate customers more than any other marketing tactic. Almost 70% of millennial consumers are motivated to buy a product if their peer recommends it to them. Likewise, nearly 30% of consumers worldwide invest in products that have been recommended by celebrities.
Your outbound sales strategy can include sourcing influencers through email or social media messages. Communication will enable you to grow your reach and provide a channel for distributing content. You can also ask influencers to write guest posts for your articles and share them on their personal channels, which can lead to more visitors. In addition, by posting messages or comments on other publishers’ websites, you can get featured and thereby amplify your reach.
Conclusion
Making use of the most effective strategy when it comes to lead generation, it’s not always the best fit to only make use of one strategy. A combination of inbound and outbound lead generation can result in the most optimal strategy if combined in the right way.
